Helicopters / Wagner

Evidently change happens in the background:

Getting married Septmber 3rd.

Applying for MA anywhere.

Moving house to wherever anywhere ends up being.

Would like to meet affordable future.

Most people I work with = six years no pay rise.

Submitted a petition to UK government titled "Privatise the royal family".

Rejected on grounds it was a joke.

I failed to mention I wasn't joking.

So what could they do.

Their hands were tied.

When someone says their hands were tied they mean they didn't want to voice an alternative for fear it might affect their status.

You hear it a lot in the Civil Service.

I'm off.

I thank you for reading.

I hope to re-emerge soon with something gobby and less comprehensible.

Trounced Haddock, Gloomy Cod

The staff performed welcoming and efficient routines to an intriguingly non-confrontational soundtrack in Damien Hirst's cafe. One of the spot paintings ogled me from the opposite wall, bravely ignoring the butterfly wallpaper behind it, and echoing the thin cabinet of small fish in perspex coffins next to the entrance. A popular song minced from the speakers, in which an optimistic boy sings about a new pair of shoes, followed by several hundred thousand other songs of similar shapes and colours. There were no other customers. It was obvious: this playlist was an unannounced piece of never-stopping art, repelling locals and tourists alike, more baffling and visceral than any number of formaldehyded animals, and disappointingly audacious in its resemblance, like the spot painting, to a machine-generated array of squibs. I wrote that sentence across three packets of white sugar and used it to pay for another coffee. The barista smiled at me through her completely transparent motorbike helmet and said you're right, it's called The Joy of Not Giving A Shit.
I'd come to Ilfracombe to see the statue of the pregnant woman you could see the insides of, standing on some law books and thrusting a sword in the air. Later, in the very good chippy, the chip man described his first encounter with the statue. It was lying down, having a rest next to some concerned people, who said they were such big fans of Jesus that they found it nigh-on impossible to approve of anything that wasn't Jesus. And this statue wasn't Jesus at all, not even lying down, not even slightly, and how could he stand here not disapproving of it.
He boxed and bagged the fish and chips and said it's nice to have something to look at.

Our Thinking Equally

The advertising-enhancers have been quiet lately. I hope they're planning something gigantic. For a good month I've not seen a single thudding obscenity scrawled across an immaculate chin, no happy genitalia slapped across a logo, and no oh for fuck's sake smeared over a slogan.
For the summer, the billboard by the roundabout showed a blue sky with popcorn clouds behind six towers of silver squares that spelled out HATE.
Somebody used to tear down the new posters on the billboard on the corner as soon as they went up, a knack for disfigurement that gladdened the spleen and made questions grow: do they climb up there somehow or use a thing on a long stick or what? Are they one person or a few? Are they afraid of getting caught? Have I met them and not known?

Zero Fucks

The DJ thought it was important that we saw all of his teeth. He was displaying as many of them as he could. You couldn't call it smiling. Maybe he couldn't close his head-flesh around them all properly. He was on a stage at one end of a stone-floored batshit palace. There were more teeth in his head than people in the room. He played doof-doof chipmunk music. We nodded. A large-haired man in a Subhumans t-shirt rode a yellow spacehopper back and forth in front of the bar. I want to say back and forth across the bar itself but on this occasion that wouldn't be accurate. When the DJ stopped we went upstairs to the big room where three normal-faced men were playing loud scraps of yesteryear. The air gleamed and pulsed, we could taste sweat, and voices behind us politely asked whether or not we'd like to buy any enhancements. An hour passed and the normal-faced men stopped and a golden-toothed man with very recently-washed hair played some hard fast excellent everything. During the intense bits he would smile, and punch his left wrist with his right hand. At the back of the room, on the bench, against the wall, a man in a tracksuit had a nap. A security guard aimed a beam of light at him. The napping man's eyes remained shut, the security guard brought the torch right up to his eyeballs. The napping man writhed and insisted he was, considering the circumstances, fine.

Eye Balm

London, london, listen, an exhibition, Mail Me Art, loads of excellent pictures on envelopes from all round the world and I have some words on one too and they're all for sale for charity and the show is 30th July to 3rd of August at the Framers Gallery W1T 2JT Goodge Street tube or Tottenham Court Road tube or put rollerskates on a horse and get there on that, as long as you get there.
Inf: http://www.mailmeart.com/
Purch: http://www.mailmeart.com/product/ed-garland-original-mail-art/

Doff

One of the pictures in the gallery was a huge dark shiny abstract probable vagina, and I leaned in closer thinking I might learn something about technique, yes they’ve really, you can see right here, applied one thing to another with unfathomable panache, etc, but a piercing one-note alarm went right through everyone’s head, and an attendant scuttled over politely muttering about sensors and invisible thresholds. I withdrew, and from then on tried to keep my head directly above the rest of me, and shuffled past the tasty sculptures and bland collages until I came to the infinite book.
A man had photocopied bits of some books and illutrations he owns and likes and once he had fifteen thousand pages he packed them into a few boxes and placed the boxes on several one-bright-coloured steps and stages and plinths, with instructions for us (you) to have a rummage and take ten pages home and make a book or a whatever you like out of them, nobody's going to come round and check. On my way out I stole a pencil from the lobby and went back to the pasty shop and bought and ate another chicken pasty, alertly, and watched the sea for an hour.

Right of Way

Drizzle soothed my warm ham face. I ate a sausage bap and got wet. The bus to Land’s End was open-top, but nobody’d brought their goggles so we all sat on the lower deck peering at the bottom half of some green and grey views for an hour. I wondered about the first-and-last pub at our destination, I vaguely remembered its existence from a school trip or a family holiday or a film or a dream or a newspaper article or an episode of Michael Palin's Affable Wayfaring or a hallucination or absurd wish I had once. The drizzle stopped. The bus stopped. The pub was still standing, but it seemed like some slobbering maniac with a hammer’d boarded up all the windows. I checked round the other side, thinking maybe there was some kind of sunlight tax in operation (if you want natural light you'd better go outside and fucking work for it, explained Mr. Osborne, not just loaf around in booths and nooks, drinking yourself gormless and sucking away the sunlight from hard-working British outdoor family units, before laying down a classic slide show about how the way to solve a problem is to make it worse, to a theatre full of thieves and ghouls, naked except for hoods) and they’d covered up all but one of the windows to keep the overheads down and pass on their savings to you, the valued customer, in the form of competetively-priced while still independently-owned pints. But no. There was a man pulling things out of the front garden and putting them in a bucket. It’s closed, he said.

I turned around and strode and wept manfully towards the westernmost shopping village in England. Tears slid down my neck while I looked at jumpers and sweets and wondered what this tiny mall had to do with the demise of the pub. Probably everything. Maybe I should snap all the sticks of rock in half and start eating the fudge without taking it out of the boxes until someone views my thirst and anguish seriously. French children threw soft toys at German children. I went and stood on the edge of a cliff.

It was a good cliff, surrounded by other good cliffs, and I walked towards Sennen Cove wondering if there are people who grow up without cliffs like there are people who grow up without snow, and thought I might write the word cliffs down as a note to myself, and discovered I’d lost my pen.

I walked up the hill to the Sennen post office bus stop and waited for the bus to Porthcurno. It arrived exactly on time but on the opposite side of the road to the one advertised, and for some reason didn’t take my slightly narrowed eyebrows as an indication it should stop. I waited a bit longer and got the bus to St Ives, thinking how many times can a man accidentally arrive in St Ives in one holiday, but I haven't been to the Tate yet so I guess I'll do that now. 

I got off the bus and bought a chicken pasty to eat on the walk to the gallery, and it tasted good and made me think that I was doing the right thing and that all my hopes and dreams were perfectly valid and in no way unattainable, and on the final stretch, gallery to the left, sea in front, last bite of pasty in my raised right hand and me looking at it thinking we were fucking made for each other, you and I, there was a ripple in the atmosphere and the sudden sense of an uninvited presence and no noise at all and then I was looking at the ascending behind of a seagull with my food in its beak, clearly unwilling to negotiate or apologise, and an American couple in white baseball caps asked me if I was alright, and I said I spose it was my turn. I was still hungry.

Jaws

In St Ives there are crowds in thin lanes and when a bus goes past everybody faces the wall. We are looking at the sea and through gallery windows at pictures of the sea. Tiny dogs ride around in handbags. A few of the shops sell fudge, and one of these shops is very keen to let you know, in an underlined and laminated sign, that the fudge on offer there is in no way affiliated with any of the fudge on offer elsewhere, you got that? All the other fudge is full of broken glass and lies. The fudge game must be no joke round here, many a life having been torn to sweet tatters by the retailing of inferior fudge under the superior name of, I forget what this shop is called. I hope they can find peace before any blood flows into the sea.

Giedra finished. I’ll miss her. Jose Saramago arrived, beeping and jiggling, with his Blindness. It has funny bits, at first, dollops of ha-ha in the worsening squalor. (So far, that is, by page 109, who knows how it’ll progress. The outlook is not good.) I like that Jose doesn’t have time for speech marks. 

I’m at a table on a balcony. Having spent an hour looking at the sea and beach to the east, it might be time now to spend an hour looking at the sea and beach to the west. If I close one eye and tilt my head a bit, I can make my nose replace the land on the other side of the bay, and the waves trundle up it and it tickles.

By page 173 there’s no more room for joking. Maybe the jokes went in at the start to make the eventual lack of jokes seem more serious by contrast.
A sign advertising boat trips lists one of the destinations as Hell's Mouth (no mention of death’s door). For booking information phone Derek. Now I’m in a craft beer/hot dogs type place. You know: a Ruby Jean’s Burger Garage, a Betsy Turnpike’s Chow House, and it has a balcony with a good view of the harbour and the bay and the hills and the balcony I was on earlier. David Gray or oh god it might be James Blunt is playing, and I’m pining for Motown. I could run and launch myself, wailing, off the balcony and over the road and into the water.
Out in the bay a rumour of dolphins emerged and was blown into Derek’s ears and out of his mouth, opposite, but nobody’s biting. I’d like to see a dolphin but he hasn’t offered to bring one to me, and I don’t want to end up in Hell's Mouth, I’ve been there before and only a fool’d go back on purpose, and now The Killers are playing, Jesus, put James Blunt back on.

In between these balconies I walked to Carbis Bay, the next one over, behind the hill my nose was, it was big and quiet, blue and beige, you know what a beach looks like. At the back of it a man sat drinking rose (ay, rose-ay, where's the button for e-garnish on this Mac?) from the bottle, a pink umbrella obscuring his face, but you could see a grey cone of beard tickling his chest, and three small dogs sat watching him.

I’m facing east again. Soon it’ll be time to face west.

Oh here’s Jack Johnson, my life is fraught with invisible peril, won’t be long before Laura Marling’s here, this soundtrack doesn’t seem to go with the hot dogs and craft beer experience, shouldn’t we be having Huey Lewis or a Bill Cosby monologue or something, why’s nobody consulted me on this, it’s as if they don’t value my many balanced opinions at all.

It must be time to go elsewhere. This pint is reluctant to disappear, I don’t know what the music is now but it’s obviously meant to induce contentment, which I’ve always found obnoxious, like a stranger squeezing your hand, here’s Redemption Song, it’s time to go. 

Ponds

Up some stairs there's a room about the size of a basketball court with the floor painted black and water all over it and slices of large log in the water arranged so you can go from one slice to another in non-mortal delight. The water is oily from the log juice leaking into it. The whole thing is a recreation of the opening scene of a film that never got made or nobody saw or both. There's a man in one corner who I don't think was in the film but needs to be there in real life to make sure nobody gets despicable. Some of the slices are big enough to sleep on. Some of them wobble. The worst that can really happen is you get wet and cry about it for a week. I'd imagine this isn't what the artist intended but it's definitely a possibility he's introduced. I took the A4 photocopied explanation home so I could read it at leisure, but leisure hasn't arrived. One day I'm going to have an exhibition of sentences found in the descriptions and explanatory notes of galleries and museums. I just need a snappy title and I don't know if An Exhibition of Sentences Found in the Descriptions and Explanatory Notes of Galleries and Museums is it or not. It probably is, but also what about Mind Puke? Please advise.

Tax Credits Could Top Up Your Earnings

I'm in this thing with them ones at that place. I sent my doings off today, in a tube. Zoosh.

Soonly Near

One more delay to go then no more delays and the thing will be available by the end of the month and it's going to turn your life around or not adjust it at all.
Simon Reynolds and Alice Ball did the cover. This is the front of it. It also has a back. The back will have you foaming at the eyes. It contains a commercially suicidal but very accurate description of what's inside. I'll attempt a more sensible version on here soon. But in a word: entertainment.
Simon's unlabyrinthine website is here.
Alice's doesn't exist.
Thanks for snailing with us.

Honesty Rampage Ruins Community

I'm going to stand and point at the output of two people.
Sara
Chiv
I don't know if they're mortified by their own output. But if they didn't want it being looked at, they shouldn't've put it on the internet. They also shouldn't've, after that, told me where to find it. I might've had to do some mild wheedling. But I didn't cajole.
I look at their output and think two things. One is: I wish I could do that. The other is: output isn't a very nice word for what might've been decades of isolated creative anguish only broken up by the odd brief cloud of confused satisfaction that dissipated as soon it settled, leaving behind a damp-smelling emptiness larger than the space it filled and the vague but persistent thought that things aren't quite as they should be... But it's also the name of a colossal DJ Suv tune from 1997. And colossal tunes from 1997 don't get played much these days. Whenever they do, people who've heard them before but not for ages immediately begin screaming like derailed trains. Check out the other Saturday when this happened at Metalheadz History Sessions. At one point MC Moose has a sip of champagne and almost instantly does an impression of Alan Partridge. A bit later Goldie gets so boisterous that Moose gives him a red card, which makes you picture Moose, against your will, for the entire rest of the set, dressed as a football referee with knee-high socks and Adidas Predators and a tiny whistle-shaped microphone. What I'm saying is output is one of the best things there is.

Bid Submitted

Caroline made a world out of cardboard. There were devices and the sea and industries. People were invited to paint it and they did. It was part of a big yearly thing. It went on for about eight hours and as soon as it ended we took it down. Next door someone was making something out of paper and everywhere else there were things popping up and whizzing about and films and music and singing on the beach at dawn by some underground choir I think, but instead of noise when they opened their mouths I heard that what came out was Maltesers. We didn't make it. The next day we wrote messages onto bits of paper and put them in cigar boxes on the walls of somewhere Mark E. Smith isn't a fan of.

The Old Sense

That whiskey, there's a woman's face advertising it too. She's got something about love written on her in gold and her photo is black and white so you know she's from the past. I don't know who she is and neither does the internet. The adverts mainly appear in what used to be the chasm of despair but is now quite a nice road. Its buildings were designed by war-drunk architects who thought that the primary effect of all new structures should be to induce a whitewater flood of hopelessness in anyone who lived in, glimpsed, walked past or smelled them. So if they were bombed into chunky dust like their predecessors then nobody would really mind. Then in the nineties the IRA exploded the Manchester Arndale Centre but accidentally got the Corn Exchange too and all these architects got together and said sorry to Mo Mowlam and asked her to do something and she did and that's why things are better today. They didn't bomb this road in Bristol but it was recently niced up by loads of people who can paint massive things and some people who put fabric round trees so it's alright now and people take pictures of it and can even be seen openly enjoying themselves.

Schmibulations

We went to the all-human circus and the best thing there was the man who wore loads of hats.
I tried to post this yesterday but the bottom bit got cut off, which was unbearable, so I deleted it and now I can't remember what else I had to say, but:
My friends had a show and asked me to write about it so I did.

Other Operators 1

Twice now some people I've never met have printed something I've written together with other things other people I've never met have written or drawn and distributed it to other people I've never met. I haven't thanked them for this yet, because I'm a fucking monster. And monsters get scared of confronting reality. Ask anyone (who's a monster). They're at Darklane Quarterly and also some of them I've been led to believe sometimes do stuff with words on the first Wednesday of every month at The Thunderbolt in Totterdown, which is an area of Bristol very close to Temple Meads, which is the train station, which is what people used to call the railway station until that began to sound silly, which is a shame but we're not going to fucking cry about it are we? Like they do in the Letters page of the fucking Guardian?

Comprehensive Information Really Good

We ate elaborate breakfasts and walked round looking at stuff. Some of it was art and some of it was architecture and some of it was peril and one bit of it was a blob in a jar. It used to be alive. I think it had a mouth. There were very many other things in jars and we were hungover.

Resurrection Pie

Donny picked me up on the hill and we went through the gorge. He was spending Sunday in his car with The Clash. He went dff-doosh along with the drums in Police and Thieves, explained that he was a physio in Amelie and it was boring, he was doing it to get the money to go off and do Chinese medicine, and the difference between Joe Strummer's voice and Junior Murvin's, in the original, produces a delicious contrast in his mind, when he thinks about it. Dff-doosh. I said it's good. I had the window open, I could've leaned out and licked the rockface. Donny chuckled and spoke in English:
- Fuck your mother!
I laughed. He laughed.
- Aha! I don't speak it very well but I am remembering now certain things.
The sun was behind a mountain. He dropped me off opposite the cascades and turned around and waved goodbye.
Then market day, in Ceret, rhymes with beret. We were up before the sun with a van full of bread and jam. A half-hour drive down the gorge passing hunters on their way up.
The market is through the streets and under the trees. Grey trees, taller than the houses. Most people are selling by eight thirty. Cheeses From Another Time, mushrooms, tablecloths and tapes. For your cassette deck, you withering relic. This was an excitement because there's a tape player in my caravan/space pod. And it wants feeding. But all they had was Elton John, The Police, Jean Michelle Jarre. That kind of thing. The Eagles. I gave up.
Picasso was there. For a while, a while ago, while he was alive. There's an A4 sign about it. And a street with his name. Nothing tacky. They've gone all out on gutters, a foot wide and shin-deep and possibly polished.
By five past two everyone's packed up and gone into the unstoppable lunch. I had a drink in a café. The waiter opened the bottle one-handed over his shoulder, I pretended I'd seen it before.
A dizzy squealing sound came up the road slowly. Six men in white cheesecloth shirts, wielding diddle-doo tubes and goblin pipes and one had a sort of canvas-stomached wooden goose he was squeezing and blowing into, I couldn't tell which part of the noise was his. It was an Animation Musicale, re-enacting and advertising a sequence of events from back when that kind of noise was the golden bomb. Fliers were handed out. The men were on a one-day tour of the region, to be finished with a spectacle. It began to rain. No one felt like applauding. I said woo but they couldn't hear.

Three Days Under A Bush

With the pine-needle carpet. Twenty feet away there was a twenty foot drop to the sea.
I heard seagulls only once.
There was a shop round the corner, a church down the hill, sunrise to the left, sunset to the right. I ate salami, drank water, started reading Moby Dick. I wanted something putdownable.
It was a different bush every night, plenty to choose from and no need to get complacent.
Joggers went back and forth on the cliffs. Cruise ships came out of Marseille, went to the right, turned into shoeboxes.
One night after the sun'd gone but the light remained someone played acoustic guitar for an hour.
A woman said be very careful with your papers.
To describe someone traveling alone they say arsehole. A seul. It's something to think about.
I phoned a farm. They said when can you get here. I said about a week. I went to Aix-en-Provence.
Architecture was everywhere. It was unstoppable. Cobblestones and fountains too, exploding. Most of the walls were a shade of yellow.
Art history used to live there. If you were a fan of Cézanne you'd be bouncing. I went to the Matisse exhibition.

Perpignan was giddy and had hot wafts of bin-stink creeping round it. Plenty of narrow roads uphill with tall houses either side and white litter circling. Palm trees on the main roads, men on the corners. It's Catalonia. Signs in two languages. The paper said someone's set fire to an apartment block again.
I stayed in a hotel that would've been dilapidated but they'd painted flowers and leaves all over the walls and furniture. They'd painted a cat halfway up the stairs and painted tiles around the bathroom mirror.
Near the uni were two men, one with an acoustic guitar and one with a keyboard set to piano and turned up to distortion. He used all the keys, it was a rushing ascending noise, it followed me round corners, you couldn't hear what the guitarist was doing.

Avignon to Arles

It was calmer this time. I sat in a park and watched people photograph the sculptures and the church and each other. The pope's old house was across town. I didn't go. I wondered how the current old nazi pope is getting on, with his tour, has it happened yet, has he been arrested by Richard Dawkins.
I took a train to Montpellier. I practised my sleeping man impression and was unbothered by the conductor, if there was one. I remembered to dribble slightly, and twitch.
Montpellier was a cold grey bustle. It was ten past five. Rain was ready. Hotels were expensive. I walked through the end of everyone's working day, queues for everything, roadworks. My bag felt enormous. I got back on the train.
Frontignan sounded alright, it had that gn sound, like Avignon, which is also alright, and Beef Bourgignon, which is tasty. I got off there.
It was an industrial estate surrounded by water, with a bit of old town to bimble round, and plenty of wind to barge through. I bought a bottle of red wine and went back to the station.
It was five minutes down the line to Sete. I didn't bother faking sleep. I thought: How many chances do you get to camp near a backwater industrial estate with an ill wind blowing and a whole horizon to yourself, probably as many as you like, it's not an amazing idea, you don't have to actually go in the direction you're going, it's fine, it's noble, how short is life, not long, and not getting any longer, getting wetter and darker.
I went from the train directly to the other platform to wait for one in the opposite direction. I wished I had a guidebook or three. They'd tell me where not to go. That's why they're good. Why did I ever think it was cool to not have one.
The train back to Montpellier was lively. I dribbled and twitched. As we went out of the station the ticket police stopped the man walking next to me.
It was more appealing with the lights on. I went to an expensive hotel and asked them where a cheaper hotel was. It was round the corner, the hotel Edouard 7, the rain was a bastard, I gave the man some money and went to my room, ate a chicken sandwich, put on some more clothes and went out.
The rain did five minutes on, five minutes off. I felt decent. The O Saloon were doing pints for three fifty. I borrowed a pen.

French keyboards are not designed for the English. They've moved a and m and z and q and apostrophe and comma and full stop. I spend half my typing time pressing backspace. The m is the hardest to overcome, so I'm going to cut down on m usage.

The morning happened. Montpellier has stuff to look at and things to do. I walked around. I decided to go by train to Arles. The train drivers were on strike, or most of them. I waited an hour for a train to somewhere near Arles, where there was a rumour of a bus the rest of the way. I went there, sat at the bus stop, an hour passed, the ten people who got off the train with me gradually went away, as cars pulled up beeping and whooping, and bags were slung in boots, and radios turned up to fuck yeah.
The wind pummeled my face.
A fight started opposite me, across the car park, four or five men doing the about-to-fight dance, in the middle of the road, traffic honking. My bus was nowhere. I walked two kilometres to the next roundabout, then another two to the next one, across sunflower fields, they all had their heads down.
Akim picked me up. His car was all black except for the red seatbelts and he talked very quickly. I responded very slowly and he very generously finished my sentences with words I'd never heard before.
-Rainy times in England?
-Yeah, but it's
-Good women?
-Yeah, they're
-You like French women?
He took his hands off the wheel and stroked an invisible woman.
-Yeah.
That was the end of the conversation.
He dropped me outside the walls of old-town Arles. I walked through and around and up and down. It was Van Goghy. I didn't know. I bought his book of letters last year but abondoned it soon after the start because he yelped so much about Jesus and nothing else.
I found a campsite, put the tent up, opened the wine from Frontignan. The sky was clear except for one dark cloud like a sunken ship, with a few more behind it, and as the sun disappeared it started flickering, yellow-white, every few seconds. It carried on for half an hour before any thunder happened.